Category: Firebug

Today I’m going to present the MotorController class for Python that handles – guess what – a motor controller using a BeagleBone along ROS wrapper node.

Usually motor controller hardwares are operating with 2 wires per channel: a PWM signal for speed and a “boolean” signal for direction. It’s quite easy to handle such things using an Arduino but we’re trying to get rid of extra hardware since the BeagleBone is also capable of solving all this stuff.

Yesterday we went to our evil genius friend to ask him to make a new rover for us. Instead of making a new one we ended up reviving an old rover.

This rover was our robot in the competition of Magyarok a Marson 2011 (Hungarian on Mars). The competition was similar to a capture the flag game, with four rovers on the field at the same time.
We weren’t that experienced that time (and our budge was low) so the project failed. We were good in the first round but unfortunately at the second round some smoke has been made and the motorcontroller went to the robo-heaven. Also we smoked an 25A car fuse, yeah something was very bad in our design. We didn’t have the automatic control in time so we used the manual version. In this case we had to use 15 sec delay between two command to follow the rules. We started the blog roughly after two months to the competition. Here is a picture of the rover at that time.(more…)